Booking, insurance, transfers, lessons, hire, lift passes. Handle them in that order before you fly and the week runs smoothly.
Leave them and the first day of your holiday goes on a queue in a hire shop. Everything below is what Sam tells his own friends to do.
How close you stay to the lifts can be more important than how nice the room is. Five minutes from a lift with a gentle area to learn on beats a smarter place twenty minutes away, and it matters most with children or anyone still finding their feet.
A package bundles flights, transfers, accommodation and often the lift pass, with one company answerable if something goes wrong. Booking the parts separately gives you more say over each one.
Worth knowing: most annual travel policies stop at the edge of the piste, so winter sports cover is usually an add-on rather than something you already have.
It is also the one thing that’s cheaper to sort at the same time as booking, because cancellation cover starts from the day the policy does.
A few providers that cover winter sports, if you want to compare:
We’re not insurance advisers and nothing here is a recommendation of any policy.
Transfers come in three shapes: the coach that comes with a package, a shared minibus, or a private car or minibus for your group. The coach is the easiest thing to say yes to. A private transfer runs to your flight rather than a timetable, and once there are five or six of you the difference per head is smaller than people expect.
Journey time is the thing to look at before you choose. Two hours on paper can be four on a Saturday in February, and the last hour of a long transfer is what people remember about the first day.
Lessons are a really important part of the trip, along with the right kit. Sam is a working instructor and gives friends the same advice.
Group lessons are sociable and plenty of people love them. Private tuition gives you an instructor to yourself, which is why families and anyone with limited time take it. You can have one instructor for the whole family, one each, mornings only or every day of the week, in most decent resorts.
The instructors worth having are booked early, which is the only reason we mention it here rather than further down.
Sorting hire before you arrive means the shop already has your height, weight and boot size, so the skis are on the rack with your name on them and the bindings are set. It also skips the Sunday afternoon queue.
Standard skis can suit a first trip, and for some a shorter ski is friendlier to learn on. Owning your boots and hiring the skis is the combination most regular skiers settle into.
Resorts sell passes on their own websites, usually a little under the ticket-window price, and it saves the first queue of the week.
The one most people miss: a beginner spending week one on the nursery slopes rarely needs the full multi-valley pass, and most resorts sell a smaller area for a fraction of it. Children are often free below a certain age, and family prices exist that most people never notice.
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